Andreas Brockhaus presented a draft plan for migration of all courses from Blackboard to Canvas, and asked for feedback and recommendations from the committee.

UW Bothell has been using Blackboard as our Learning Management System (LMS) since 2000. In UW Seattle, a variety of LMS’s have been deployed by various departments and schools. Until very recently, there was no central UW Seattle LMS offering. However, Seattle is now supporting Canvas as a UW-wide, centrally supported LMS. Last year’s Technology Advisory Committee, as well as the Instructional and Research Support Committee, recommended that UW Bothell transition to Canvas.

Our current license with Blackboard ends in Spring 2014. We plan to have all courses moved to Canvas by the end of Fall Quarter 2013. No new Blackboard courses will be created starting Summer 2013.

IT will help users migrate courses and data to Canvas, but much of the work needs to be done by faculty. During Fall 2012, about 20 faculty attended migration workshops. At the recommendation of the Instructional and Research Support Committee, Learning Technologies will host a wider series of workshops during Winter and Spring 2013 to help faculty with the process. The Technology Advisory Committee agreed with this recommendation.

To inform students, Learning Technologies will post information on all Blackboard intro pages, as well as on the screensavers on public computers. The committee discussed more ways to communicate with students about the migration and the timeline, and recommended that that we hold information systems in the Commons during lunch times.

Laura Mansfield asked for feedback and recommendation on a strategy for moving our UW Bothell website into the mobile arena, saying that we are already falling behind other colleges in universities in our ability to show content on mobile devices.

Some required background work is underway, including an upgrade to the campus’s Content Management System. While that work is being done, the campus needs to decide on a strategy and design. One important decision is whether the site should be designed so that every page renders well on a mobile device, or just a selection of pages.

Part of the background work will be for the web team to develop a better understanding of responsive design that allows for automatic detection of device size, displaying websites accordingly. Even with responsive web design, however, designers will need to make decisions about what to cut out of pages in order to shrink them down for mobile display.

The committee agreed that UW Bothell should follow good design principles that could apply to the addition of new apps in the future. Another suggestion was the ability to switch between mobile and desktop versions on every page. Links to Canvas, registration, and course schedules will be very important, from a student perspective.

Future Discussion Topics

The committee briefly reviewed topics that have been listed for possible discussion, advice, or recommendation this year, and agreed that the list should be reviewed in more detail at the next meeting so that we can plot out agendas for the next several meetings in advance.

In addition, the January meeting will include presentations and feedback on

·Data center and cloud support strategies – feedback from the committee on draft proposal

·Technology budget proposals – feedback and suggestions from the committee